Jennifer Feeley is the Anglophone voice of renowned Hong Kong writers such as Xi Xi 西西, Wong Yi 黃怡, and Lau Yee-Wa 劉綺華—whose thrilling and chilling Tongueless is our Book Club selection for June 2024. Set in a vividly multilingual Hong Kong, Tongueless is a heartrending horror novel about the human face of language disappearance, and what it means when we no longer have the words to speak to one another. Despite the contemporary social and political alienation depicted in this vivid novel, Sinophone Hong Kong literature is flourishing in English, German, Italian, and other European languages, testifying to the diversity and dynamism of the Hong Kong literary scene. Asymptote is grateful to Jennifer Feeley for her humour as she shares the process of translating Tongueless; her generosity in recounting the complex heritage of literary Chinese(s); and her commitment to championing stories from Hong Kong for global readers.
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Michelle Chan Schmidt (MCS): How did your interest in Hong Kong literature arise?
Jennifer Feeley (JF): In the summer of 2005, I attended a poetry conference in Beijing, where I met the Hong Kong writer and scholar Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞, also known as Yasi/ Yesi 也斯, or PK Leung. When PK came back from his trip to the mainland, he spent an entire day showing me around, and we talked a lot about Hong Kong poetry.
He recommended the work of Yau Ching 游靜—who’s also a filmmaker—and suggested that I also take a look at her film Ho Yuk 好郁 (Let’s Love Hong Kong), one of the earliest lesbian films from Hong Kong. Later in my graduate school career, an essay I wrote on Yau Ching’s poetry became my first academic publication. That was when I really started to consider Hong Kong literature—particularly poetry—and its genealogy. How do we define and categorise Hong Kong poetry? Can we do it by language?
As an academic at the University of Iowa, I taught Hong Kong cinema and literature, and began to write about Hong Kong film and research musical films from the 1960s. As I noted that a significant amount of Hong Kong literature had yet to be translated into English, I became increasingly frustrated. Even when translations existed, many were not available outside Hong Kong. For instance, I wanted to teach Eva Hung’s translation of Xi Xi’s My City《我城》, which was published by Renditions in Hong Kong in 1993, but the bookstore was unable to order it. I could only teach part of the novel through PDF versions of my copy, due to copyright restrictions.
When I finally bought a copy of Xi Xi’s Selected Poems, I fell in love with her work: her language was such a challenge. Purely for fun, I began to translate them. Shortly after, I was approached by an editor from Zephyr Press, who invited me to translate a book by an excellent Mainland Chinese poet. I liked this poet, but I was so in love with Xi Xi’s poetry that I decided to take a risk. I translated a sample of her work, and they obtained the rights to publish it.
MCS: Do you see any similarities between the playfulness in Xi Xi’s poetry and other Hong Kong writers’ work?
JF: Xi Xi is unique in that she was never interested in literary trends. When I look at her poetry, it feels quintessentially “Xi Xi”. The more I read her work—especially Thoughts from the Left Hand 《左手之思》, the collection that came out posthumously last summer—the more I see links with modernist Hong Kong poets from the 1960s–70s, which is when she started writing. I hope I’ll have the chance to bring some of Xi Xi’s early poems into English. Since many of these pieces hadn’t been collected until recently, many readers didn’t even realise that they existed.
But if I look at Xi Xi’s overall corpus beyond poetry, I see a lot of commonalities with contemporary writers in Hong Kong, both in content and style. For instance, there are resonances with Dorothy Tse 謝曉虹, Hon Lai-chu 韓麗珠, and Dung Kai-cheung 董啟章, for how they create alternative spheres of Hong Kong without naming it. In many of Xi Xi’s stories and some of her poems, Xi Xi writes about a fictional counterpart to Hong Kong called Fertile Soil Town 肥土鎮. She even wrote the novel Flying Carpet《飛氈》about this place. Some of these authors’ works share a strategy of writing about Hong Kong in a sort of fantastic sphere, using allegory or fairy tales.
There’s also a younger writer I’ve been translating named Wong Yi, whose work shares a lot with Xi Xi. In one of her books, The Four Seasons of Lam Yip《林葉的四季》, Wong Yi uses the technique of defamiliarisation to explore the mundane aspects of life in Hong Kong.
MS: In that sense, Tongueless is almost the exception to the rule, in that Lau Yee-Wa names a concretely recognisable Hong Kong. And yet, in the completely abstract and awful allegorical educational system that Lau depicts, she plays with the same mode of defamiliarisation. How do you view that defamiliarisation in Tongueless?
JF: I don’t know that Tongueless is an anomaly because there’s a lot of realist literature from Hong Kong too. Wong Yi’s most recent project—one that hasn’t been published yet— looks at Hong Kong’s history through monuments. Other writers who name Hong Kong concretely, like Leung Lee-chi梁莉姿, who wrote Everyday Movement 《日常運動》, and Cheung Yuen-man 張婉雯, who writes realist fiction and essays, have been getting attention. I don’t want to give the wrong representation; I was earlier talking about commonalities I saw with Xi Xi.
In terms of Tongueless and defamiliarisation, I think the novel amplifies real anxieties for some in Hong Kong. The author taught in a secondary school there, and her depiction of that environment is horrific and terrifying. I’ve never been in that position, so I can’t speak to Tongueless’s realism or how much Yee-Wa might be intentionally distorting or amplifying certain aspects. When she was approaching literary agents, I know she was portraying it as more of a social realist novel.
MCS: Did you collaborate closely with Lau while translating Tongueless?
JF: When I work with living authors, I joke that I become their stalker, harassing them at all hours of the day and night. I ask a lot of questions; I want to make sure that I understand what the author is writing about, but also that, as I recreate their work in English, I avoid unintentional distortions. I like to respect the authors I’m working with.
I talked a lot with Yee-Wa about her experiences, especially as some of the terms used in Hong Kong secondary schools are unique—they’re not even used in the UK. As someone unfamiliar with the concept, “discipline teacher” was so confusing—is someone beating the students? I also wanted to make sure I was using the correct names for the grade levels. I’m from the US, so it was important to me to get the terminology right.
Tongueless’s original English-language publisher, Serpent’s Tail, is based in the UK, so I was primarily working with the editors there. They suggested changing some of the terms—we don’t say “senior secondary school” or “discipline teacher” in the UK. But I insisted that we keep the terminology, because these are actual terms used in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong is a multilingual city with English as an official language—so why would I change the official English terms that are used? It would be insulting to Tongueless to impose terms used in the UK or the USA. Once I explained my logic, the editors were okay with it. Except for some of the spelling and lexicon, the US edition—published by Feminist Press—largely followed the UK edition and retained all the school-related terminology that I had included.
MCS: What did you bring from your previous experiences of translating Hong Kong literature to Tongueless?
JF: All the knowledge collected from previous experiences are taken onwards. Thanks to Xi Xi, I gained the experience of dealing with wordplay, which made me excited to tackle the language issue in Tongueless. Language is something we have to think deeply about when we talk about Sinophone literature.
Most of Tongueless is in standard written Chinese. That’s the written language largely based on [the Beijing dialect of spoken] Mandarin, codified during the early twentieth century, and it’s meant to be unifying across the world for people who can read Chinese. For Mandarin speakers, there isn’t necessarily a huge gap between standard written Chinese and spoken language. (I say “not necessarily” because it depends on where you are. There could be lexical and even spoken differences between Mandarin and standard written Chinese, but fewer than between Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Shanghainese, and written Chinese.)
Standard written Chinese is extremely different from Cantonese, the spoken Chinese language that’s dominant in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, people have to use standard written Chinese when reading and writing in Chinese classes, whether the subject is verbally taught in Mandarin or Cantonese. Most of Tongueless is written in standard written Chinese, which is how most writers in Hong Kong write, but most of the dialogue is represented in Cantonese—which isn’t common in Hong Kong literature—and some of the dialogue is in intentionally terrible Mandarin. If you read the book in Chinese, you will see a lot of dashes, because the character Wai stutters when she speaks Mandarin. When I first read it, I couldn’t tell if they were dashes or the character for the number one「一」.
Because of these linguistic challenges, I was excited about Tongueless. I love the idea of translating something that people say is not translatable, because everything is translatable; it depends on how you stretch your imagination to consider the concept of translation. Of course, an exact replica is impossible, because it’s a different language. That, I think, is the biggest thing I brought to Tongueless—my interest in pushing the boundaries of language.
By the time I started translating Tongueless, I had already been translating fiction by Wong Yi. She uses some Cantonese in her dialogue—though not always—and has specific reasons for its appearances. We’d talked a lot about it, so I’d already been thinking about questions like: what is the function of using Cantonese in dialogue? How can you translate it? Cantonese is so colorful and vibrant—how do you bring that vibrancy into translation, while balancing precision and literal meaning? I wanted to bring these questions to the forefront as I worked on Tongueless.
(I should add that there’s a small body of writers in Hong Kong who write completely in Cantonese, with their own literary ecosystem. Through second-hand information, I’ve heard rumors that some of them feel that it can be tokenising when other writers from Hong Kong throw only a smattering of Cantonese in here and there in their work, but I haven’t verified this myself.)
MCS: Could you share how you came to translate Cantonese? Your conversations with Wong Yi on the function of Cantonese in dialogue sound fascinating.
JF: Though Xi Xi is one of Hong Kong’s most famous authors, she writes in standard written Chinese, not Cantonese. She sometimes uses a Hong Kong-specific lexicon, but most of her books were published in Taiwan by Hung-fan Books. If you don’t read or speak Cantonese, you’ll have no problem reading Xi Xi’s work.
(When translating Xi Xi’s poetry, it was still important to me to hear the sounds of Cantonese. At Iowa, I recorded Dung Kai-cheung reading several of Xi Xi’s poems aloud. I would also use Pleco, the dictionary app, to get the sounds of Cantonese. Xi Xi’s case is tricky, as she grew up in mainland China until she was twelve. She was educated in Mandarin and spoke Shanghainese on the playground, but Cantonese with her family. I never knew whether I should play with the sounds of Mandarin or Cantonese in Xi Xi’s work. When I finally got to meet her, she admitted that she sometimes preferred the sounds of Mandarin, sometimes Cantonese. I had to figure this out on a case-by-case basis, depending on the poem.)
Wong Yi was the first writer I translated who used Cantonese in her writing. With Xi Xi, it was about the sound; with Wong Yi, I needed to be able to read it. I had great plans to come to Hong Kong in 2020 to study Cantonese, but you can guess what happened, which is that it did not happen.
When she was studying abroad in the UK, Wong Yi wrote an essay about what it means to be a Hong Konger called “Can We Say Our Hometown Is. . .” 〈可不可以說我鄉是…〉; my English translation is forthcoming in the journal Transtext(e)s Transcultures. In the essay, she and one of her friends, also from Hong Kong, discuss Cantonese phrases and parse them—literally what the phrases mean. In that case, it made sense to first give a literal translation of the phrases, then to gloss them and explain their idiomatic meaning.
Wong Yi also has a story called “Overseas Bride”〈過埠新娘〉that pulls your heart out (first published in Ways to Love in a Crowded City《擠迫之城的戀愛方法》). My translation was just published in Chinese Literature and Thought Today. We don’t know the gender of the story’s narrator, the “I”; they could be a man, a woman, or a non-binary person. A woman asks them to marry her, but because they live in an undisclosed place that’s not Hong Kong, they’re hesitant to make this woman an “overseas bride”. The story becomes a love letter to Cantonese, as Wong Yi put it, in “all its vulgarities”. It incorporates a lot of expressions from Cantonese. The point of the story is to show all the richness of the Cantonese language—everything that a native Cantonese speaker would lose if they left Hong Kong as an “overseas bride” or otherwise.
As it’s addressed from one insider to another, I wanted to make sure that the language feels very fluent in the English translation. The story isn’t about explaining something to outsiders: it’s more like: this is our inside language, you know this. In my translation, I was sometimes able to make literal translations work, but in other cases, I used equivalent idioms in English or had to invent them.
In Tongueless, I felt that Cantonese comes across as the normal or default language. The teachers speak Cantonese in the teachers’ lounge; Ling and her mother speak Cantonese to each other. Cantonese wasn’t marked as a language that is different or other. The strange language is Mandarin. That turning of the tables influenced my approach to translating Tongueless.
MCS: Are you still planning on learning Cantonese?
JF: When I was translating Tongueless, I worked with different manuscripts. The book was originally published in Hong Kong in 2019 by Wheat Ear Press, which is an indie press that may have folded. It was then republished in Taiwan. When I signed on to do the translation, Yee-Wa gave me a Word copy of the manuscript for the Taiwan market, with footnotes for the Cantonese. She also wrote me a glossary translating some Cantonese vocabulary into standard written Chinese. The Taiwanese edition of Tongueless has less Cantonese than the Hongkongese edition, with footnotes explaining the Cantonese that appears in the dialogue. I made sure to look at both versions when translating.
Interestingly, there came a point when I realised that I wasn’t looking at Yee-Wa’s notes or glossary anymore, and I was inherently understanding what she had written. In other contexts, I’ve compared this to a small child learning how to ride a bike. If you have training wheels on the bike, but your parents remove them, you don’t realise that you’ve learned to bicycle until you notice that the training wheels are gone. And you’re like, Oh my God, I don’t have training wheels, and you fall over! When I realised that I wasn’t looking at her notes anymore, I suddenly had to double-check my translations.
Compared to a lot of other people, my process is backwards. If you’re a heritage Cantonese learner, or from a Cantonese-speaking environment, you may speak Cantonese without regarding it as a written language. It varies from person to person, of course. It’s strange for me to be able to read some Cantonese (specifically the way Wong Yi and Lau Yee-Wa write) without being proficient in speaking and listening, but I’d definitely like to take a proper course. In my position as a translator, I think that I have an ethical obligation to become better at speaking and hearing Cantonese.
Wai’s terrible Mandarin was completely different because sometimes I had no idea what the words were supposed to mean. In the original Chinese, to convey her non-fluency, the author occasionally uses words that might be homophones or near-homophones, depending on what form of Chinese one speaks to another. For example, a recurring phrase in my English translation is “horde lurk”. In Mandarin, it’s supposed to be「辛苦」(pronounced xīn kǔ), which means “working hard” and connotates suffering. In written Chinese, Yee-Wa conveys this by using characters that are pronounced xiān fú「先符」in Mandarin. The first time xiān fú is mentioned, I believe the author does indicate that they represent「辛苦」, but you don’t translate the book in one sitting, right? It takes several months. The next time I encountered xiān fú, I was very perplexed: the characters were complete nonsense. I had to ask Yee-Wa.
A similar process occurs with a shadow character to Wai, a sex worker from the mainland working in Hong Kong. Her Mandarin is great, but Yee-Wa uses the same strategy of inserting incorrect characters to represent her poor Cantonese, so I had to double-check what she meant. It’s as though Yee-Wa invented her own language to represent these two characters’ bumbling versions of the respective languages.
MCS: Are there any exclusively Cantonese-writing authors that you would like to translate in the future?
JF: I think purely Cantophone writers should be translated by native or completely fluent speakers of Cantonese. It’s different if the author mostly writes in standard written Chinese, inserting dialogue or characters’ thoughts in Cantonese. But something entirely written in Cantonese—I wouldn’t do that right now.
In fact, in trying to make Hong Kong literature more available outside of Hong Kong, I’d like to encourage more translators, especially those from Hong Kong or the Hong Kong or Cantonese-speaking diaspora. If we can be more inclusive of a larger range of translators—particularly translators with connections to the original language—we might diversify not only the works that get translated but how they’d be translated. In general, the Sinophone translation industry is very white, even though it’s Chinese Hongkongers who have pioneered the Hong Kong literary translation field. Sometimes, in the global sphere, their efforts get minimised or erased. Including more heritage translators or translators from Hong Kong is important to me.
My opinion on translating Cantophone literature goes back to the language issue I brought up earlier, about how we use designations of language to discuss literature written in Chinese. I’ve seen some people say that Tongueless is translated from Cantonese; others might speak of a Mandarin [original] version of Tongueless. The fact is that there are only two Chinese editions: one is Hongkongese, and one is Taiwanese, and both are in complex [traditional] Chinese characters. There is no “Mandarin” or “Cantonese” version per se, though both languages are featured in the novel’s dialogue, and the Taiwanese version has slightly less Cantonese.
Another example is Xi Xi. I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying that her books are translated from Mandarin, because you can pronounce standard written Chinese in a variety of spoken languages (for example, Taiwanese or mainland readers might opt to read her work aloud in Mandarin, whereas Hong Kong readers might read it aloud in Cantonese), and also because that would minimise the Hong Kong-ness of her writing. But they’re not translated from Cantonese either. They’re translated from standard written Chinese, in complex [traditional] characters or simplified characters (several of her works have been published in simplified character editions in the mainland).
I do sometimes see literary works that people describe as being translated from, for instance, Taiwanese Mandarin or mainland Chinese Mandarin. I wonder: how do these designations relate to the written versus the spoken language? I don’t know. I think this comes from good intentions because people want to acknowledge that there is not one monolithic “Chinese” language, which is true. But there is such a gap between written and spoken Chinese languages in many places, especially Hong Kong. I’m not sure what to do with this language issue. It’s a thorny thing.
MCS: How would you like to see the Sinophone translation industry evolve in the future? What kinds of voices would you like to include and highlight?
JF: Hong Kong literature is an exception, but I feel that a lot of translated Sinophone literature is still authored by men. I’d love to see more queer writing, as well as writing by women. And of course, when you get into specific regions, the writing that exists beyond the canon varies hugely. This is a huge question, because the Sinophone is a huge sphere, and it depends on the place: it would be wonderful to have more Indigenous literature from Taiwan, for example. I’ll focus on Hong Kong in my answer, to make it more manageable.
Not every writer in Hong Kong writes in Chinese. There’s a vibrant Anglophone literature, as well as other languages, because Hong Kong has a large South and Southeast Asian community. There’s even a collective of Swiss French writers, some of whom are based in Hong Kong, collaborating with Hong Kong writers on a French-Chinese project. I hope people reading this are aware of the diversity of Hong Kong literature.
When academics talk about modern Chinese literature, they often look at the mainland during the early twentieth century, or increasingly Taiwan. But by adding Hong Kong to the mix, you can challenge people’s preconceptions and ideas of modern Sinophone literature. I’d love to see more translations of Hong Kong poetry, especially from the 1920s–30s. Some time ago, I heard Dorothy Tse (a wonderful scholar as well as writer and translator) present on Tse Sun Kwong謝晨光, a modernist Hong Kong writer from the 1930s, whom I hadn’t known until that point. I realised that apart from Chang Ai-ling/ Eileen Chang 張愛玲 or Xu Xu 徐訏, I’d never heard of Hong Kong writers from this period. (Neither Chang nor Xu Xu were strictly from Hong Kong, but sojourned or moved there from mainland China as adults.)
I’d love to see English translations of Sinophone Hong Kong literature help to construct a better genealogy of Hong Kong’s literary past, including from the 1950s–60s. There are scholars in Hong Kong working on these literary histories; we just don’t have a lot of them available in English, whether it’s academic research or translations of their works. Personally, I’d love to bring some of Xi Xi’s earlier poems into English, as well as some poems written in the early 2000s that I don’t think were published until last summer. For example, she wrote poetry about the loss of mobility in her right arm after receiving treatment for breast cancer. When I received my copy of Thoughts from the Left Hand, I lamented that I had prior commitments and couldn’t just sit and translate it immediately.
The very first book that Xi Xi published, in 1966, is a novella based on West Side Story, called East Side Story《東城故事》. She stitches the narrative together using montage as a literary technique. Maria is a young intellectual in Hong Kong, and each section is narrated from a different viewpoint, including that of Tony’s dog. Novellas are unfortunately tricky to publish in translation, due to their length. Xi Xi also has a novel called My Georgian 《我的喬治亞》about Georgian dollhouses, which she constructed; in the novel, she uses them to explore colonialism, among other themes. Jasmine Tong is currently working on a translation of Xi Xi’s The Monkey Chronicles《猿猴志》, which I’m super excited about. Jasmine is also a visual artist, and The Monkey Chronicles has lots of photographs of the various monkey puppets that Xi Xi made. Xi Xi has written so much, and I’m so glad that other translators are also getting involved. She’s finally being translated into other languages, too. Karin Betz, the German translator of My City《我城》, Meine Stadt, just won a major prize for her work. Incidentally, Tongueless is also going to be published in Japanese.
Speaking of contemporary writers, there’s an interesting queer writer named Lam Samwai 林三維. Natascha Bruce’s translation of one of her pieces has been published in the Massachusetts Review. Leung Lee-chi is wonderful too. Most people know her as a fiction writer, but she’s written really interesting poems. I was lucky enough to translate one of her short stories, “Empty Rooms”〈空室〉, back in 2021. It’s told from the perspective of objects, including protest stickers and a table, in the flat of an upper-class family emigrating from Hong Kong. I mentioned Cheung Yuen-man earlier, who writes about the history of older neighborhoods in Hong Kong. If I’m not mentioning other authors, it’s because there’s simply too many to mention. Just too much. Whenever I open a new issue of the literary journal Fleur des lettres《字花》, Hong Kong’s Chinese-language literary journal, I see so much good work that we genuinely need more people to translate it into different languages. A lot of it is still underrepresented, even in English.
MCS: I’ve heard about Dung Kai-cheung using AI to self-translate a novel!
JF: Yes, Dung Kai-cheung is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent writers. A few of his novels have been translated wonderfully into English by Bonnie S. McDougall, Anders Hansson, and Yau Wai-ping. He’s using ChatGPT to translate his book Hong Kong Type,《香港字》, into English. Do you know the reason for this, Michelle?
Getting a book translated is obviously not a quick process. It takes a lot of time, effort, and money. Last summer, Kai-cheung told me that he could eliminate these needs by using ChatGPT; not to mention that his longtime translator, Bonnie, has retired from translation. He’s also deeply interested in technology.
Kai-cheung is the author, so regardless of the ethics of using ChatGPT to translate, he has the right to do so. He’s been publishing the translation of Hong Kong Type in instalments on his Substack, but he’s planning to sell the complete work as an NFT. I told him that his work deserved a human translator and offered to help him find translators, publishers, and editors. I’m not volunteering myself, because his work is way too hard; it’s so dense, and he’s so smart and prolific.
It could be an interesting companion project. One translation done through ChatGPT and sold as an NFT; one by a human translator, sold through conventional publishing. Hong Kong Type is such an important book, too, about the history of the Hong Kong typeset. The present-day protagonist in it speaks to the little pieces of type, and they tell her their origin stories. Her ancestors become involved. Kai-cheung did so much research into how this particular typography evolved in Hong Kong, and it’s fascinating. It’s too good to be only translated by ChatGPT.
MCS: One of our readers has a question about language and wordplay. Are there any examples of wordplay in Tongueless that you were extremely happy about? Were there any you had to abandon, because they might have come across as overly distracting and forced?
JF: We already touched upon “horde lurk”, hard work, for 「辛苦」. I wanted to make sure that when Wai would speak her terrible Mandarin, her intended meaning would come across through similar-sounding words in English; but I also wanted to preserve the awkwardness and stiltedness of Wai’s language. I also needed to be able to translate it as ‘lurk horde,’ work hard, because the term 「辛苦」can be a noun or a verb.
At another point in the novel, Wai is trying to say the word “mainlander” 「大陸人」, pronounced dà lù rén in Mandarin. She mispronounces 陸lù as 女nǚ, which means “female” or “woman”. In my translation, as much as possible, I wanted to highlight Yee-Wa’s word choices when it came to depicting Wai’s mistakes, but I needed the English sounds to match. So in this case, I translated that as “main-mander”: even though my translation inverts the binary, I was happy to be able to bring in the gendered aspect.
In terms of overly forced wordplay, I can’t remember specific examples. I did tone down Wai’s stuttering. In my initial draft, which I kept close to the Chinese original, there were too many dashes; the Chinese original was hard to read too, but my English translation was a real mouthful. In a few places, I took away one syllable of stuttering, but I think Wai’s dialogue can still be difficult to read.
MCS: We have a final question about your process of translating. Do you read the book multiple times before you begin? Do you translate every day?
JF: It depends on what I’m translating and differs between poetry and prose. If I’m translating a poem, I read it multiple times, recite it, and I might make a recording of it being read aloud. I make word-by-word notations; if there’s a pattern of rhyme, rhythm, or sound, I mark it up in different colors.
When I translate poetry, I focus on two things: what is the crux, the heart, of the poem? What makes it beat? And can I bring that into English? If I can’t, and I have the option not to translate it, then I won’t translate it. Not that I think it’s impossible; I just don’t know how to do it at that time. The other thing I look at is the poem’s ending, like in gymnastics, where you have to nail the final landing. How do I nail it in my translation? I put a lot of time and detail into translating poetry.
With prose, it’s completely different, especially with full-length books. I’ve seen other prose translators say that if they don’t read the book multiple times before working on the translation, they feel they can better maintain suspense and narrative flow.
I can preface this by talking about how I came across Tongueless. At the time, I didn’t know who Yee-Wa was, but she sent me a friend request on Facebook. From her bio, I knew that she was a writer and I saw that we had a lot of mutual friends, so I accepted her request. One day, I asked Wong Yi: who is Lau Yee-Wa? And what’s this book that I’ve been seeing across my timeline?
After I heard about Tongueless from Wong Yi, I saw that Dorothy Tse had written an article in Chinese about the book. In the article, Dorothy compares Tongueless’s Wai to the protagonist of a story by Xiao Hong 蕭紅 called “Hands”〈手〉, published in 1936. Wang Yaming, the protagonist, works in her family’s dye factory and is teased at school because her hands are stained dark from the dye. I thought to myself, if Dorothy says Tongueless is a good book, it must be. Later, I came across another Chinese-language review of Tongueless by the crime fiction writer Chan Ho-kei 陳浩基, discussing its psychological horror. That was more than intriguing. I ordered a copy of the book to be shipped internationally and messaged Yee-Wa asking if the English-language rights were available. She said yes.
When I received the novel, I knew from the second page that I wanted to be the translator. I read it through in a couple of sessions. It was a total page-turner, the fishiness and sinisterness of it. Before I translated it, I didn’t reread it in full. I’d read it in sections as I translated, but when I finished my draft, I read the whole book again in Chinese.
With a novel, you don’t have the luxury of time that you have more of with poetry. If I annotated a novel the same way I do poetry, I’d take ten years to translate it and be extremely poor.
I also translated the White Fox series, which is children’s fiction by the Shanghainese author Chen Jiatong陈佳同, aimed at ten-year-olds. I didn’t have time to read the whole book before I translated it—I was on such a tight deadline—so I was learning what happened as I went along. I felt like a detective: I had to keep on translating to know the story.
The process of reading and translating really depends. Of course, you’re eventually reading it multiple times during the course of the translation. It’s just a question of when you do it.
Jennifer Feeley is the translator of Xi Xi’s Mourning a Breast, Not Written Words: Selected Poetry of Xi Xi, and Carnival of Animals: Xi Xi’s Animal Poems, as well as the novel Tongueless by Lau Yee-Wa, Chen Jiatong’s White Fox series, and Wong Yi’s Cantonese chamber opera libretto Women Like Us. Her forthcoming translations include Xi Xi’s My City. She is the recipient of the 2017 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.
Michelle Chan Schmidt (she/her) is a senior assistant editor for fiction at Asymptote and a 2023 Editorial Fellow at Full Stop, helming a special issue on literary dis(-)appearance in postcolonial cities. She has contributed to Full Stop, La Piccioletta Barca, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, The Trinity Journal of Literary Translation, and Asymptote. More here.
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